Travel Marketers Plan to Invest in Various Marketing Tech in 2018

Travel marketers across a variety of sectors–including transportation, hospitality, restaurants and online travel agencies (OTAs)–will focus on various technology investments within the next 12 months, primarily mobile and social, according to new data from Econsultancy and Adobe.

In fact, a larger share of marketers said mobile experience and analytics are a top priority for 2018. And almost as many respondents—particularly those in the OTA and restaurant sectors—felt the same way about social technologies, like monitoring, publishing and measuring.

But while these technologies were named as priorities, so were emerging ones, including artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing automation.

Over a quarter of respondents in the transportation (27%) and hospitality (26%) sectors were interested in marketing automation. And when it came to AI and machine learning, OTAs had the highest interest: Nearly one in five said the technology would be a priority within the next year.

Similarly, OTAs had the highest interest in conversational commerce, including chatbots and virtual agents. Other sectors also showed interest, but to a lesser degree.

By and large, marketers have been turning to a range of technologies to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts, from data management platforms (DMPs) to marketing automation.

And many marketers from both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are using similar technologies to measure their efforts, according to a separate study from Salesforce.

For example, half of B2B advertisers surveyed said they used a marketing attribution platform to measure digital ad effectiveness, and almost as many (48%) of B2C advertisers said the same.